Carlisle Independent

06/30/2019

First place award winners at Saturday's Arkansas Press Association luncheon in Hot Springs. (APA Photo)

Papers honored by APA

The Arkansas Press Association’s annual editorial awards luncheon was held in Hot Springs on Saturday, and the now-closed The Times of North Little Rock and Lonoke County Democrat were recognized for outstanding work in the small weeklies category.
Gatehouse Media closed the papers with little notice on Aug. 31, 2018, and also took down the associated websites, depriving former readers and subscribers access to the archives, so active links to the award-winning work aren’t available.
Work that appeared in the two papers won a total of 15 awards.
Contributor Dale Ellis won two first place awards. One was for Single News Photo and was taken at the construction site of the new Jacksonville High School. The other award was in Coverage of Politics/Elections for a series of stories on last year’s primary election.
Photographer Jaison Sterling was again honored by the APA with a first place in Single Feature Photo. This year’s winning shot was of fireworks at Dickey-Stephens Park. Sterling also received second and third place honors for photos of Razorbacks baseball and high school basketball.
Editor Jeremy Peppas received a first place in News Story, for a deadline-driven story on a police shooting in North Little Rock that left one teenager dead. Peppas also received first place in the same category in 2017, and this year received a second place in Best Front Page and an honorable mention in Series Reporting.
Peppas, along with Dr. Donna Lampkin Stephens and Bridget Bauer, received a second place in Sports News Story for a package of stories on North Little Rock and Central Arkansas Christian winning a total of three state basketball titles last March.
Stephens took home second and third place in Sports Features, ending her five-year run of winning first place in that category. The features were on, respectively, retiring CAC athletics director Doug Killgore and the appearance of Lonoke’s Casey Martin in the College World Series as an Arkansas freshman. Also honored for sports writing was veteran columnist Harry King, who received a second place in the Sports Column category for a look at CAC’s Christyn Williams, who was National High School Player of the Year and signed with UConn.
Sara Greene received a second place in Coverage of Tourism for a lengthy look at the inaugural Italian Festival held in North Little Rock, while Allison Goodman, working for the Lonoke County Democrat, received an honorable mention in Single News Photograph.
Neal Moore, who wrote the popular Moore on Maumelle column, received a third place in News/Political Column for a piece on a proposed sales tax.
The Times, despite only eight months of operation in 2018, also took home second place in General Excellence, an award the paper won the previous year and finished in second the year before that.
“The papers were in a situation where the ownership wasn’t worthy of the effort that was being put forth on the editorial side,” Peppas said. “The out-of-state senior leadership was especially out-of-touch with the needs of the communities that the papers served and more focused on the bottom line.”
The reality, Peppas added, is, “Gatehouse isn’t very good at the bottom line, either. When the company purchased the assets of Stephens Media in 2015, the stock was trading at more than $25, and now that stock price has dropped to under $10 with no end in sight.”
In roughly three years of ownership, Gatehouse has closed 15 papers around Arkansas, and sold four more, leaving behind fewer than a dozen in the state.

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